Planning for "Important notice: Planned maintenance for Azure will impact virtual machines in South Africa North"

Question

The below message has been added to the planned maintenance. As some services have not been built around high availability, we need to plan this outage.

The time window is board, over 5days. Is there any way of ensuring this change is down during the business maintenance window. Or get an appropriate time to action the shutdown to mitigate data damage (Temp directory will be reset).

Any guidance is greatly appreciated,

Regards
Michael

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Service: Virtual Machines

Region: South Africa North

Stage: Planned

Impact Category: Service Availability

Maintenance summary: An upcoming maintenance update will affect virtual machines in South Africa North, from 20 August 2022 06:20 UTC until 25 August 2022 06:20 UTC. During this planned maintenance window, IaaS virtual machines will be migrated to newer network hardware. Please expect each virtual machine to be unavailable for up to 15 minutes after initiating the maintenance. Operating system and data disks will be retained, but temporary disks will be reset.

See a list of your affected virtual machines in the Account Information section of the email sent to administrators at approximately 08:15 UTC on 18 July 2022.

Recommended action: For more control over when your virtual machines will be affected, migrate your deployments using the following steps for the Azure portal or PowerShell. You must complete the migration prior to 20 August 2022 06:20 UTC.

Answer 1

Hello, @Michael Sanders !

How do I prepare my virtual machine for planned maintenance?
Based on the email snippet you provided (thank you!) I can say with a high degree of confidence that the email you received is providing instructions for customer initiated maintenance prior to the automatic maintenance window.

This means that you have until the start of the planned maintenance (20 August 2022 06:20 UTC) to complete the maintenance yourself at a time that is most convenient. Follow the links provided in your email but I suspect they will take you to the following resources:

• Start maintenance on your VM: Azure portal
• Start maintenance on your VM: Azure CLI

From your email:

Recommended action: For more control over when your virtual machines will be affected, migrate your deployments using the following steps for the Azure portal or PowerShell. You must complete the migration prior to 20 August 2022 06:20 UTC.

From the VM maintenance documentation:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/maintenance-notifications

Planned maintenance that requires a reboot is scheduled in waves. Each wave has different scope (regions).

• A wave starts with a notification to customers. By default, the notification is sent to the subscription admin and co-admins. You can add more recipients and messaging options like email, SMS, and webhooks, using Activity Log Alerts.
• Once a notification goes out, a self-service window is made available. During this window, you can query which of your virtual machines are affected and start maintenance based on your own scheduling needs. The self-service window is typically about 35 days.
• After the self-service window, a scheduled maintenance window begins. At some point during this window, Azure schedules and applies the required maintenance to your virtual machine.

The goal in having two windows is to give you enough time to start maintenance and reboot your virtual machine while knowing when Azure will automatically start maintenance.

You can use the Azure portal, PowerShell, REST API, and CLI to query for the maintenance windows for your VMs and start self-service maintenance.

Additional Resources:

• Maintenance for virtual machines in Azure: Overview
• Handling planned maintenance notifications
• Azure Blog: A new Planned Maintenance experience for your virtual machines
• Azure Metadata Service: Scheduled Events for Windows VMs
• Plan for Azure maintenance events in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Maintenance window (Azure SQL)

Answer 2

Thank you so much for your time. This is perfect.